On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 04:46:14PM +0700, Kim-Ee Yeoh wrote:
The convention, say with a google-groups based mailing list, is that conversations in mailing list are public by default. With some manual C&P, you can email responses in private.
For cafe participants using web-based email, the situation is reversed, through no fault of their own.
Sorry if I am slow, but are you (in so many words), proposing Reply-To munging? That is indeed standard in google-groups (and I discover now, on haskell beginners); it left me quite surprised when I first experienced it. Mutt handles munging quite elegantly (when From and Reply-To are not the same, it asks for confirmation), but are other clients so gracious? Yes, I am worried about private replies broadcast to the world (and archived on gmane, etc.). ^Reply-To Munging Considered Useful^ [1] is quite patronising on the matter and doesn't convince me:
This is simply not the responsibility of the administrator. People are responsible for their own mistakes. If someone is sending a private email which is derogatory, or otherwise embarrassing were it to be made public, they should probably be sending it directly, rather than as a reply to a public message. They should also pause and think about whether they should be sending it at all. This pause should be quite sufficient for a conscientious person using a reasonable mailer to catch any mistake that they might be about to make.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110305025338/http://www.metasystema.org/essays...